In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we are covering some advanced techniques that you can use to optimize your landing pages. The typical web user has evolved and it's important for web marketers to evolve with them. By taking a look at how the web has changed we can make more informed decisions on how to optimize our pages and maximize their impact.

Video Transcription

Hey everyone. I am Joanna Lord. I am the Director of Acquisition over here at SEOmoz. Welcome to another Whiteboard Friday. I am going to be stepping in for Rand today. So no, I am not Rand in case you are wondering. I want to be talking about something pretty exciting that I love talking about. So hopefully this goes well.

It is on-page optimization. We are going to be talking about a lot of the stuff that we do here for landing pages, and I am going to take a little spin on it. I know there are a lot of articles out there that help you with the basics of landing page optimization, but I think that that is really well documented and we are going to kind of skip through that really fast and instead we are going to talk about some of the more advanced things that we are doing, some kind of philosophical changes that we are trying to use to stir our test.

Traditionally, I put up here the kind of things that you would think about before. You are looking at your pages and you are like, "We really need to increase conversion, or we need to do better. What can we look at?" The first thing obviously is being specific, making sure that those landing pages really match up to what people are searching for. We can do this through headlines. We can do this through the images we put on the page or the paragraph text that you put on there.

Then you look and you want it to be clean and you want it to be concise. This one is really fun for designers, right? We want to make it visually appealing, and you want to make sure that what people are looking for is kind of well spread out on the page. It has got a lot of white space around it. It has got some bullets. It is really easy to find.

The third one is around the call to action, and I think that we are all pretty well versed on this. We want it to be big. We want it to be bold. We want it to be contrasting so that when people find the page, they know what we are expecting them to do.

The last one surprisingly a lot of people still kind of maybe mess around with or they haven’t done enough for and that is this concept of the page really needs to branded. It needs to be trusted, and when someone shows up, it needs to be really obvious that you are the authority. You are the one they should go with. You can give them your money. It is all sorts of things around the idea of trust. For a long time, I think if you nailed those four things, you were doing really good. You were safe. You can make some money. You would have another day in your world. But I think that things have changed and users have evolved. That is kind of what we are talking about today.

I actually put up here a really beautiful, really sassy-looking diagram on why I think that the users’ expectations have changed, and how we are going to solve for that we will get to in a little bit. The number one thing is I think just like what I just said, this concept that the user has evolved. Before, a person didn’t see as many sites in one day. They didn’t see as many sites on one topic. So they didn’t have an expectation before they came to you. You might have been the first site they found that was e- commerce on this type of brand. But now, they are seeing so much more and it is saturated. So they have higher expectations before they even get to your site.

The second one is trust redefined, and this is a really big one. This one we can’t understate, and that is that right now, because there are so many ways to show that you are authority and to show that people like you, that people expect to see it on the page. We will talk about some of the exact signals, but for the most part, they are really expecting more from you. The social engagement and the UGC expected, when people show up to a site, they really want to see that there is a community going on, that there is a number of people talking about you, that you are talking with them, and that there is kind of a sense of happiness around whatever the brand is or whatever the product might be. These too are already an expectation. It is not optional anymore. It doesn’t separate you if you have it. You really need to have it.

Design expectations have been raised. I know Rand wrote a blog post about this a while ago, so I am not going to talk too much on it. But with sites like Dribbble coming out and just having so many great designers out there, the websites are beautiful and yours has to be beautifu, too. People are going to bounce if they just don’t feel that your site is visually up to their standards.

Search equals discovery. I think before, if you answered their need, that was almost enough, but I don’t think it is enough anymore. I think that they really want to discover more about who you are and what you do and why you are doing it. This idea of sentiment, which is just really this idea that when someone comes to you, they don’t just need to feel that you can get them what they need. They don’t just need to feel that you are there to answer their questions. They need to feel positive about you and that you are someone they can connect with on multiple levels. That is just because we spend so much more of our time online that where we spend our time is really that much more important to us.

I think that is a lot of how things have changed, and that is why these don’t exactly answer it anymore. I am going to talk about some things that I think we really need to be thinking about as website optimizers.

The first, the basics. You do need to have these. Some people are getting really excited about their landing pages right now, and they are going out there and they are building these beautiful HTML5 sites, but they don’t have the basics and people are bouncing because they don’t feel comfortable. You do need to have these, but then you need to move on to some of these. Let us jump into some of these, and let us talk about what they are.

The concept of rethinking conversions is interesting because I think as marketers, we say to ourselves, "I need to track what’s important to the bottom line," and we do, we absolutely do. You need to know your purchases, your conversions, your form fill-outs. You need to know even how many emails you are getting, if you are backing that out for lead gen.

All of those are still very important, but there is a lot of other conversions you need to be testing for and keeping an eye on. Your social counts, that should absolutely be an optimizer’s job to increase. Getting people to like you, getting people to follow you, those should be your job. Member counts, can you get them to sign up for a membership? Where you put it on the page and how it is shown is all part of our job. Downloads and engagements, those are also important to us. It is not just about leaving them with something anymore. It is about getting them to go deeper into the site. Demo counts, I put this in there a lot because I think people forget about this. If you go to SEOmoz right now, you will see that we have our features there and we want you to take a free trial, but we also want you to explore the product, and we very much track how many people go into the feature section of our site and how do they interact there and how do they engage. That is a really important one.

Then feedback, I know a lot of marketers that when they put up a survey on the site, if they use something like KISSinsights, they get it up on the site and they say to themselves, "Well, we’re not going to worry about conversions for the next seven days because we’re collecting feedback." But that is not really the case. That should be your conversion. You should be testing to see how you can get more feedback, how you can get more surveys completed. All of this is about rethinking conversions, and you need to be testing for it as much as you would have tested for any of these more basic elements.

On the second here, we have the brand strengthening, really important and I think it is pretty fun stuff. Traditionally, as marketers, we might have thought to ourselves there is a certain job for that at the company. Whether it be the CMO or your MarCom manager, there is someone who is in charge of making sure that everyone sees us a certain way. I think that you can do this with your landing pages really effectively and you can build a story over time. That is what this column is all about. Traditionally, when you think of brand, you think we need logos up there, we need some testimonials up there, we need to make them feel safe. But I think there is more you can do. Things like mission statements, where you put them, do you just have a byline up? Is there more that you consistently use on every page on your site? Things like awards, have you won awards? Do you bury them in a press section or do you move them up? Things like consistency, making sure that whatever you say about your product or your company on one page you say across the whole site is really important. You don’t change your key adjectives. You should be testing what adjectives really resonate with your audience.

Badges are also really important. I know a lot of people that they just put up kind of their phone number in one place, and they will put their email in another, or they will put their shipping policy over here. All of that should be compounded together into a badge. People want to see all of your trust signals in a very tight space because they are looking for all of them when they see one. They will just assume that you don’t have a good shipping policy if they don’t see it next to your phone number, that sort of thing. You need to think about that, where you are putting it, the placement.

Then positivity, I think a lot of people forget about this. They kind of put up words that they think are just kind of fun, maybe even a little bit snarky or comedic, but people don’t know you. They don’t know your culture. They don’t know your brand. When they read it, they really want to feel positivity. They want to see positive words, happiness. There are some really great e-commerce sites out there that do this really well. Things like Sephora, they do it excellently. Think about those things when you are looking at your sites.

Then testing all truths, this is going to be the hardest one to push through. It is really, really challenging to walk into a room of people that have spent years on a website and say, "Everything that is the foundation of this site, let’s go test it." But that is what you have to do, and that is what makes these really come to life. That is what makes these really big impacts across your entire site and your entire business goals. That is around the concept of traditionally you might test a feature or you might test an element on a page. Instead you are testing the whole kabang. You are saying, "Let’s test the whole layout. Whereas, before maybe we were one picture and then text down here, let’s do it dual columns." You are just changing up the entire visual aesthetic of your site.

The sentiment, so however you are presenting yourself, for example, if you are an outdoor site and you are saying, "We’re adventurous and we’re bold and we’re exciting," maybe you think completely about it and, "We’re about peacefulness and tranquility and nature," and you need to completely change the way that you are presenting yourselves and see how your audience reacts.

Things like features, a lot of companies know their key features really well and they always lead with them. Well, your audience has evolved, and lots of the message needs to evolve with it. What other features should maybe you lead with? What other features should you be testing as the true ringer, the one that gets their attention?

Design is really important. We have talked about it a little bit, but you get caught up in the design as a company and you think to yourself, "This is our vibe. This is the way that we’re going to step forward." But that really needs to be tested ongoing, because what you assume might work is the baseline, but you have no idea where you are going to fall if you switch it up. Then navigation, a lot of people, they know when the navigation is working well and they are afraid to touch it. I think it is a real injustice to not try to revisit your navigation and say, "Maybe we should really swap this around a little bit."

These are all things that I think you really need to think about beyond these really common basic landing page optimization tactics. The whole point of it is that you are really supposed to be able to look at it and say, "I think we’re making a difference. I think we’re testing some really big philosophies around our site." If you can just nail one of those, you are going to feel the impact across all your channels.

I did leave you guys with a really quick action list here that we can hopefully touch on, and that is just rethinking your goals as a company often really helps you hit some of these bigger things out of the park, because when you see that the goals change and they always do from quarter to quarter, it can help you steer what you should be testing for. That and connecting with other teams I think is really important. We do a lot of it here. We go into the Help Team. We ask them what is the trouble for them, and what they resonate to us is usually those bigger philosophical changes that we should address.

This last part is just get started, and I think it is because all of it is great in theory as always, but if you don’t actually go try to test it or if you don’t set up a new test, you are never going to know. Hopefully, that has helped you out, and I will see you next week for another Whiteboard Friday.

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